Word Count

How many words are in a story? That's easy to find, isn't it? In Microsoft Word go to properties, click on the tab, and it'll tell you. Or go to the Tools tab and click on Word Count. It'll tell you the number of pages, lines, paragraphs, characters with spaces, characters without spaces, and words. That's all you need, right?

Er....

Let's start at the beginning. How do you define a word? What is the average length? I'll cheat and tell you to go with the standard format for a story:

• 12-point Courier or Courier New
• double-spaced
• single-sided
• 1" margins all around

Though only the 12-point Courier is useful at this point. The rest is for the agents and editors who will read your deathless prose. There is a good reason for each of those formatting points. Courier is a fixed pitch serif font, and as such is vital to someone rendering your story onto a press.

These latter people are the most important in the process, at least at this point. They need to know how many pages you're story will take up as it will effect the binding and the amount of advertising they put in the back of the book (that is to make sure everything comes out in a multiple of either 4 or 16, depending upon the type of press). Thus they need to know the number of lines in your story, and how many characters you used. That includes the number of blank spaces between words.

Now after seven chapters of rewrite, Firestar is at some 56,731 words, at least according to Word's tool. It needs 4,477 lines to achieve this. But when I use a standard conversion number I took from the Science Fiction Writers of America's web page (www.sfwa.org), I get 54,120 words. What accounts for the 2,600 word difference? It's in the way words are measured.

The standard typesetter measure is that a word is 6 characters, including spaces. So take the number of characters with spaces and divide by 6, and round off to the nearest 10.

I applied this to a short story I wrote recently (Dover Street Bridge), and then counted the number of words I actually found. The count by using the spaces was off by 3 from the actual number I physically counted. Word's count was 70 higher. Naturally if I was being paid by the word I'd go with the higher count. But honesty compels me to put the smaller count in (and round to the nearest 50) because that count is a sales tool. Honestly. An editor has two stories, one of 2,300 words, and one of 6,900 words. He has a budget. And if he can put in the shorter of the two stories (quality being equal), he will do so because that gives him room for more advertising and costs less for writer's fees. It is a business, after all.